Q:Where did the round barn shape come from?

A: The orthagonal, which includes the round and octagonal and hexagonal barn came in shortly before the turn of the Century. There was some early experimenting going on at the University at Madison on the practicality and the functional qualities of a round barn. A Professor by the name of Frances H. King wrote a number of Extension circulars about round barns and he maintained that a round barn was functionally very efficient because the silo could be placed directly in the center and the cows then placed in a circular fashion around that central silo which is where they would be fed and then the manure track for removing the waste could be along the wall on the periphery of the round barn.

Well round barns were advocated for a number of years by a number of people. We do find a number of them in various parts of the state, not only round but also octagonal, hexagonal. When I first came to the University in the 1960's there were 14 hexagonal barns in Ozaukee County alone. Today only 2 I believe survive. There's one of these examples in the entry center at Old World Wisconsin. Later it was found though if you have to expand a circular building its very awkward and it fell out of favor. It would require a little more skill and some greater difficulty in building a round barn because boards and lumber typically are square and come in straight lengths.

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Q: Tell me about the different immigrants who came to Wisconsin in the late 1800's and what kinds of barns they built.

A: Some authors have called Wisconsin the most European of states and indeed more than 40 ethnic groups came here during the 19th Century. We have, for example, the largest colony of rural Belgians in this country, the largest Icelandic settlement, one of the largest settlements of Luxemburgers and we have many other groups, the Germans being the most predominant.

We don't have the largest number of German-Americans in our population, but we do have the highest percentage, interestingly enough. Most of them came from Pomerania, Northern Germany. And we have other groups that are rather unusual that you don't find in other states, Finns for example, people from Poland, people from Lithuania, some very fascinating countries and you will find their descendants in small scattered pockets in various parts of the state even today.

If you look at the place names, the cemeteries, the mailboxes, the names of the roads, there is ample evidence of our ethnic origins. And, as with their music, their taste in food, their religion, their language to some extent, they brought with them the old world methods of building. And many of the ethnic groups, at least for a few generations, and depending upon how isolated they were and how large they were as a compact ethnic unit, many did continue building with their old world methods.

The Germans, for example, most of whom came from North Germany into Wisconsin, utilized a method of building in German it would be called fachwerk and that consisted of a method that didn't use a great deal of timber. They had come from a part of Europe where there was considerable warfare over the years, fire sometimes, and extensive cultivation. And timber was actually in short supply. So building an all wood house was a very expensive undertaking. Most people didn't live in or build all wood houses. They built in this fachwerk tradition which utilized wood for the framework or the skeleton of the building but then they used another material for the rest of the wall to make it solid as the nogging or in-fill as we would call it. This was typically mud or brick and I would venture to say there are several hundred fachwerk buildings surviving in rural Wisconsin. At least there were back in the 1970's when I was doing studies of this type of construction. Many of them are sided over with clapboards or other forms of siding. You'd never know that underneath that modern looking building is an antique treasure house in terms of its old world origins.

The Scandinavians were rather abundant in Wisconsin. They settled in the southern reaches of the state and in the northern parts of Wisconsin in pockets, certainly in East Central Wisconsin on the Door County peninsula. But all of those groups brought the old world method of wood construction utilizing timber and logs. We call it the North European method of log construction whereby logs were hewn to be fitted tightly together both horizontally and longitudinally and at the corners so that it was not necessary to chink or add the mud or mortar to the spaces between the logs. The Scandinavians, the Finns in particular in Bayfield, Douglas and Iron Counties, built many log buildings. Many fine log structures still can be found there today. But they were excellent craftsmen. They hewed the logs flat on the inside and outside surfaces. The logs were pegged together by the openings where there were windows and doors and little if any chinking was used. They also had an abundant supply of coniferous wood. The pine, the cedar, the softer woods were generally more durable and easier to work to shape together into a tight building. A tight building was necessary for Scandinavian countries because being in the north heat retention was important and buildings that sheltered humans or were used by humans like the saunas, which the Finns typically built, were tight buildings and were built in that manner. If it was something like a hay barn where heat retention wasn't that important, then the logs would be further apart. The through movement of air would be important to help dry and keep dry the hay that was stored within.

Then we have people from the low countries who came to Wisconsin, people from Holland, people from Belgium, people from Luxemburg. There's a large Luxemburg colony in the south Sheboygan, north Ozaukee County area and there we can find many beautiful elegant large stone dwellings built with fieldstone. Sometimes the stone was dressed or cut, shaped to fit into the corners. Further to the north we have the largest Belgian colony in American in the Green Bay region and they built many attractive buff colored brick dwellings and even an occasional barn can be found.

When Belgian immigrants first came to Wisconsin, many of them came before the great Peshtigo fire and to get a toehold on the land, to build something to get by with for the first couple of years they, like most other immigrant groups built a simple log dwelling. But in 1871 the great fire swept through that area. It burned many dwellings, even some entire villages down. And when the people in that area rebuilt it's interesting that then they probably had more of the financial means to be able to afford a brick dwelling and indeed we find a lot of brick dwellings in that area today. We also find some unusual examples of buildings that are actually log but they're surfaced, they're faced or covered with a row of bricks and the question always comes up, why was that done. Was it done as a form of fireproofing, by people who had lived through the fire and came back to rebuild again or was there something about the nostalgia of another country, a material that they had known or lived with, they or their ancestors, that was familiar and comfortable and made a statement about who they were and their kind of sense of place? I don't know what the answer is but its part of the interesting building history that we have in this state.

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Q: Does Wisconsin have any important rural architectural styles?

A: Wisconsin is a state of immigrants, miners and farmers. It doesn‰t have a large number of high style or designed buildings that are of significance as do many of our surrounding states in the Midwest and in the East. Other than the contributions of Frank Lloyd Wright I've always felt Wisconsin's architectural significance lies in its ordinary common or vernacular buildings. The buildings that were built and lived in by ordinary people. Especially the buildings I believe that reflect their old world origins. It's kind of interesting but there's nothing like the original item, the original immigrant built item. That's real.

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Q: Are there any interesting features that you like to see on barns when you travel through the country?

A: Barns were usually very simple dwellings but we do find some interesting features that would represent various forms of ornamentation, cupola are on some barns they seem to be more common in the southern and southwestern parts of the state. Sometimes they were placed there for ventilation purposes. But another very unusual feature, symbolic feature, which has its origins back in pagan folklore would be the little cutouts that appear right under the gable peak of the roof. Sometimes there were little figures cut, a Maltese Cross, diamond cross, sometimes a heart, sometimes a Christian cross and I often wondered why was that feature there? Was it there to let birds in? Or was it there for light or ventilation or what? And I talked with a number of elderly barn builders and they would tell me well we just did it because that's the way it was always done and it really represented nothing that I'm aware of.

But upon doing further research there's an interesting story behind that particular feature. Back in ancient pagan times people lived in very crude dwellings which didn't have stoves or didn't have fireplaces. There was often just a smoke hole in the roof which let the smoke out from the fire which burned in a fire pit somewhere near the center of the dwelling. Later, when fireplaces were developed and perfected and cast iron stoves were developed they needed a chimney. The venting structure fitted into a chimney which was built into the structure. There was no longer then that smoke hole.

And in pagan times people believed that where they lived was at the center of the universe and when someone died their spirit would exit the earth into the next world and the spirit would have to leave the body and go out through a hole and these holes were fitted into dwellings for that very purpose initially back in pagan times.

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Q: Why do you think it's important to preserve old barns?

A: I've always felt that buildings are very important for reading the cultural landscape, the things people did with the land, how they built, how they shaped the land, how they made their living, what their ethnic origins were. Their inventiveness, their ingenuity. We can read all those things from buildings and barns are among the most interesting and most studied of buildings types. They can tell us a lot about people. How people lived, how prosperous they were, how inventive they were, how they changed over time, how agriculture changed over time. The rural Wisconsin landscape is full of these features. I've always felt the barn is probably the best symbol of Wisconsin. It's not a cheesehead, its not beer, its not cheese, its not the Green Bay Packers. It's the barn. Its the barn after all that's on our state licence plate. It's the barn that tells us who we are and where we come from.

We were in the past a very rural state. It wasn't until around World War I, when more people in Wisconsin began living in urban areas than in the countryside. So many of us have our roots going way back to the land, to an agricultural economy, when people built barns and farm houses and reflected these things in their ethnic ancestry and in the local materials that they used and often what they did took on a special quality which we call sense of place. They seem to have a way of fitting into their environment.

We can travel around the state and if we have a little bit of understanding about how to read the landscape we can look for these clues. We can look for these signs. We can learn to read a landscape just like we might read a book or a newspaper. One of the best things to look for in reading the landscape are agrarian buildings. They're part of who we are and being a historian of the landscape, I've always felt that we need to understand our past in order to better know where we're going and who we are and what our roots are all about. That's so important. And I have come to appreciate more and more how important our history is in the physical evidence that surround us and how important it is for people to relate to their past and to who they are and perhaps even to their future in their physical environment so I've always been a preservationist. I've always believed strongly that we should keep evidence of our past to enjoy in our everyday lives. It's important.

I think that a lot of the new environments, new towns for example, some large new housing projects, don't have that quality and I think that people's lives are a little less rich because of that. So my feeling is we should try to hold onto as much of our past as we can. We can't save every old building, we shouldn't save every old building but I believe we're losing far too many significant treasures from our past, buildings that are not going to be with future generations and their lives won't be as rich as a result.

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Q: What other things does reading the landscape‰ tell you?

A: If one were to look at the evolution of barns there is a rather interesting chronology and you can typologize this into certain phases. Depending upon where in the state they may have been built. The earliest settlers came into the southern reaches of the state, the lead mining people in southwestern Wisconsin, some of whom were excellent stone masons and we can indeed find some very old stone barns in that part of Wisconsin. But in the southern reaches of Wisconsin, where the soil was good, Yankees were among the first people. And many of them had farmed in the East. They were moving on from Massachusetts or New York. They were fairly efficient agriculturalists. They were wheat growers and usually had the financial means to build a rather large barn and it was a grain barn for threshing. Those were wood barns and they were built flat on the ground. It was before the days of dairying.

But shortly after the mid-point of the 19th Century wheat declined because of the chinch bug and other reasons, you could grow it better in Kansas, Nebraska and other states. People who remained on the farm had to diversify and then dairying began to become popular thanks to the College of Agriculture at the University and other economic courses. And many of those old grain barns had to be adapted for dairying and they did this by actually jacking the barn up and building a stone foundation where the cows were kept, down in that basement in the lower level of the barn. There was then an earthen ramp that went up to what was originally the ground floor but what was to become the 2nd floor, an earthen ramp going up to that 2nd floor. That's where the hay was stored, machinery was stored and so on.

In the cutover area, in northern Wisconsin, people who came often didn't have the economic means to build a large wood frame barn so they built log barns, originally a single pen log 4-sided structure, later another portion was added on the other side of a central breezeway or passageway for storage of hay. Cattle was kept in the other half which was usually of tighter construction. The cattle barn portion had chinked logs, the hay barn portion was open, the interstices between the logs were open.

One of the things to look for in observing barns on the landscape you'll find that the very earliest barns have an inverted V or a gable shaped roof. And it wasn't until shortly after the turn of the Century when the gambrel roof came into fashion. The gambrel roof has that extra little pitch or kick in the side. Those were developed because a barn with a gambrel roof had a greater storage capacity. So you can date barns to an extent by looking at the form of their roof. If its a V shaped barn there's a likelihood that if could have been built before the turn of the Century, and probably before World War I. If it has a gambrel roof, those were advocated by the College of Agriculture in the late teens and 1920's you know then that that barn dates to about that period of time. Later in the 1930's and 40's there was a wood truss that was developed at the Forest Products lab made of laminated boards, boards glued together which had a curved shape, a Gothic form. That's a Gothic roof barn. That was the 3rd rather stage in the evolution of a roof type.

The final stage which we see being built repeatedly today would be the pole building with its flat gable roof with a very flat pitch. So those are some things to look for when you‰re looking for barns out on the rural Wisconsin countryside.

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Q: Why do we see so many barns just falling down?

A: Most wood frame barns unfortunately today are obsolete, including the ubiquitous gambrel roof shaped barn which we see as a symbol on our state licence plate. I've been told that a farmer can virtually buy a rather modest and inexpensive pole building for about what it would cost to re-roof his old larger wood frame barn so the old wood frame barn sadly has become obsolete. Other than a few examples where they've been converted or adapted or recycled into some other use whether its just storage or a restaurant or whatever they will have disappeared from the Wisconsin countryside and there'll be a time when our grandchildren, maybe 20 years when the great wood frame barn will all but have disappeared from the Wisconsin landscape. The symbol of what our ancestors were and a symbol of what this state was all about will no longer be with us.

People who farm today sometimes keep these barns because of sentimental reasons. They may have built by their great grandparents or the grandparents. There's a certain nostalgia in a barn. There's a certain quality in a barn, maybe it's its age. Maybe it's its texture, how it stood up against the many winters and storms and so on, there's a certain solid quality about it that I think is part of the family history of certain farm families. It's like a relative that still lives on and while they may be economically unfeasible to maintain and perhaps impractical, still there will be some people who treasure this and maybe it's with future generations in mind.

But there's a certain closeness that I believe some rural families have developed for their buildings like they're another member of the family. They don't want to see them go. They will do everything within reason to maintain them. It's largely sentimental value. People who live close to the land often have these qualities. It's a certain quality that I think perhaps comes from working the land and knowing that great-grandfather used to plow down this furrow and worked on the same fence line. It's a human trait that perhaps we don't fully understand but it is there. There is a longing for the past and I think you find this, not in every rural farm family but in some. They treasure these structures like they're a member of the family so they don't want to see them go.

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Q: Is there anything being done to save these old buildings?

A: There has been a very active preservation movement in Wisconsin. I'd like to see more of a focus for it on rural Wisconsin, on barns for example, and some of our interesting rural hamlets and small towns and communities in the countryside. We know that the large stately architecturally designed houses, the chances of their being conserved are much greater. You can convert them into B & B's or boutiques, giftshops as you can see all over Door County now but the isolated rural humble dwelling of an immigrant ancestor doesn't have much of a chance.

Common ordinary buildings fall by the wayside pretty quickly and I think that's a great loss for Wisconsin because to a large degree that's what this state is all about and that's what our past is all about. I think people are becoming more interested in and involved with preservation. We do see this in such programs like the Barns Preservation Initiative and the rural preservation programs that are in place in various states. And in part its because people who live in urban areas and elsewhere have a deeper longing for their identity. The world is becoming so similar all over. What we build today in the state of Maine might look like something we might build in New Mexico or Washington or Florida. There's a sameness about our environment which wasn't the case perhaps as much in the past and hanging onto our history is a way of retaining that sense of place and people.

I think many people have a deep emotional need to understand who they are, to connect with their past, to connect with their roots. We see it in collecting antiques and in restoring buildings so its kind of an economic emotional sentimental quality that's arousing this interest in more and more Americans and Wisconsinites today plus I think people are finding that preservation can be good business. There are tax advantages in saving certain old buildings and we find many fine examples of how old buildings can indeed be recycled into wonderful restaurants or theaters or even concert halls.

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